Kids Reconstruct with Creativity: The Backstory

Kids Reconstruct with Creativity is a special project of the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.

Support is provided by our generous leadership sponsors:

Generous support also provided by:

The Backstory: Travelilng the back roads to reconstruction

The Alliance recognizes that basic human needs—such as food, shelter, healthcare, education, and employment—remain the focus as people impacted by the hurricanes continue to rebuild their lives. But behind these needs lies an emotional journey that follows the back roads to reconstruction. Those individuals who have the courage to share their journey have the power to motivate all of us to action.

"The stories of these three students—Andres Arauz, Jon Bregel, and Laura Himel—-carve paths to recovery that leave the map behind and follow their own emotional imperatives. The miracle of making one's own way is that one's own way becomes our collective way, and the back roads to reconstruction become the main avenue to a more vividly imagined future."

"A year after the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers awarded me a college scholarship for my portfolio of creative writing, I find myself up against a more bitter anniversary-that of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. A coincidence? I wonder over that word. I have spent my summer tracing the paths that connect us in the wake of disasters, and have found that those connections are not coincidental. Communal acts of creativity never are."

Carina del Valle Schorske earned a Portfolio Gold Award in The Scholastic Writing Awards of 2005, and is now a sophomore at Yale University, where she is a double major in Comparative Literature and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She spent Summer 2006 as a Project Coordinator for Kids Reconstruct with Creativity.